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The macabre American pandemonium of the past few days has been utterly riveting. The streets of Washington choked with hundreds of thousands of protesters. The riots. The goofy pink hats. The inauguration and the weirdos in senior positions with the new administration explaining away their most transparently outrageous lies as “alternative facts.” And President Donald Trump himself, barking outlandishly paranoid orders like he’s tripping on some seriously wicked hallucinogen.The sheer carnival mayhem of it all has been impossible to ignore.
During the eight years that led up to this, Barack Obama’s presidency was so suave and so stylish that it was almost possible to imagine that the American abdication from the world was not happening, that it was just some people talking. That the United States was not retreating from the Greater Middle East. That the “reset” with Russia did not end up in a humiliating restoration of the Kremlin’s lost powers. That Obama’s trade “pivot” to Asia did not end in catastrophe.
Now that Donald Trump is finally ripping up the remaining terms of an American-insured global economic order that had lasted nearly 70 years, we shouldn’t have expected that it would have all gone out with a whimper. Even so, what a very, very loud bang. It’s perfectly understandable, then, that not much attention was drawn last week to a freight train that put in at London’s Barking Station.
The train’s terminus in London ended a journey of 28,000 kilometres that had begun 18 days earlier in the Chinese city of Yiwu, in the coastal province of Zhejiang. Carrying an otherwise unexceptional assortment of electronics, clothes, bags and household items in 68 containers, the train had passed through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France, and finally through the Channel Tunnel to Britain.
The train was the first of its kind to reach Britain in the $3 trillion “One Belt, One Road” project that Chinese President Xi Jinping began punching through Central Asia in 2013. Starting with a rail link to Tehran, the network now takes in 39 rail lines connecting 16 Chinese cities with a dozen European cities. It’s 30 days faster than by sea and a fifth of the cost of air freight.
The day before the train arrived at the Barking Freight Terminal, President Xi happened to be the keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort town of Davos, where capitalism’s brightest lights and assorted hangers-on have been gathering every year for nearly a half-century. Xi is the first Chinese president to show up at Davos. The gathering this year was equal parts glum, disoriented and amazed.
In his speech, Xi’s tone was triumphant, taking care to present himself as the world’s new champion of free trade, as though the police state he oversees is not a protectionist autocracy run by a corrupt nomenklatura that has flourished primarily by the ruthless exploitation of a sixth of humanity in a vast pool of cheap, captive labour, and by the beggaring of industrial workers just about everywhere else.
William Browder, the Hermitage Capital Management co-founder and human rights champion, was not so sanguine about China replacing the United States as the principal guardian of a global economic infrastructure that began with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947. Browder described the mood of this year’s Davos gathering this way: “Everyone is looking into the abyss.” The Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Browne described Xi’s speech this way: “Posing as the saviour of globalization while dancing on its grave.”
President Trump appears to genuinely believe that he can make America great again by going it alone, by issuing instructions to America’s increasingly disaffected allies, and by threatening to exact protectionist tribute from China. But it’s rather too late for any of that. Trump’s formal nixing of the United States’ accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which was intended as a bulwark against Chinese hegemony, has only strengthened Beijing’s hand.
The TPP is now being revived as a bulwark not against Chinese expansionism, but against American belligerence. Just because the United States has bailed from it doesn’t mean the TPP is dead. Whatever Canada does – and Canada’s economy is tied irrevocably with the United States – Australia and New Zealand are now proposing that the American place in the TPP might as well be taken by China. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is explicitly backing China’s admission to the TPP.
Beijing has proposed an alternative Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, along with the Southeast Asia Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Even little New Zealand reckons that it could handle throwing in its lot with Beijing, now that Trump’s America is devouring itself.
Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy is of a piece with the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a military, security and trade forum that already binds China to Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The very day we were all mesmerized by Trump’s inauguration spectacle, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that he expected that negotiations to bring India and Pakistan into the SCO would be concluded by June.
Iran is considering a bid for SCO membership, and Turkey – a NATO ally, if that term even has any meaning anymore – is being drawn deeper into the Russian-Iranian-Chinese axis, with its brutal strongman president Recep Erdoğan openly musing about whether the SCO might prove more amenable to Turkey’s interests than the European Union. Erdogan says he has already begun exploratory talks about it with Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, Donald Trump has announced that he intends to conjure by means of a “major investigation” the evidence he has been falsely claiming to already possess, which his own legal team previously admitted did not exist, that the 2.8 million-vote lead his Democratic Party challenger Hillary Clinton took in last November’s ballot count was a consequence of “illegals” voting. This follows quickly on the heels of Trump’s maniacal claims about his inauguration ritual having drawn larger crowds in comparison to Barack Obama’s back in 2009.
It is not a happy scene. The world order is falling apart, tyrants are setting the global agenda from their palaces in Moscow, Beijing and Ankara, and the president of the United States is acting like a vindictive, out-of-control crazy person.
This is going to end very, very badly.
Statistics: Posted by Norm — Thu Jan 26, 2017 2:37 am